1. Field of Art
The invention generally relates to the field of video fingerprinting and, more particularly, relates to generating video fingerprints that can match multiple aspect ratios.
2. Description of the Related Art
Online video hosting services allow users to upload videos for viewing by other users. Over time, an online video hosting service can acquire a very large video database. Typically, some videos in the database are either exact or near-duplicates of other videos in the database. Accurately detecting near-duplicate videos within the database improves system performance, for example, including improving the ability of the online video hosting service to manage its video inventory, providing better searches, and overall faster response time.
Existing systems for detecting duplicate or near-duplicate videos in a database involve creating a fingerprint for each video in the database. Frequently, however, videos in the database contain multiple instances of a video content that differ primarily in their aspect ratios. For example, one user may upload a video that is in the 4:3 aspect ratio, while another user may upload the same video but in a 16:9 aspect ratio, or even a “squashed” 16:9 aspect ratio, where an original 16:9 video has been recorded in a 4:3 format. These situations make it more difficult to recognize the videos of different aspect ratios or formats as being the same video. Furthermore, where a video database already has a large collection of videos with associated fingerprints (which may result from videos with different aspect ratios), recreating the fingerprints for all of the videos in order to identify cross-aspect ratio matches would be costly and inefficient.